The footsteps begin before dawn Wednesday morning on Tubman Boulevard, runners pounding away down the main artery into the heart of Monrovia. You don’t find many runners in Liberia's capital, not in this West African nation more renowned for its brutal 14-year on-again, off-again civil war than for athletic success, but there are some, and they move steadily down the smooth, graying asphalt, sweating in the already developing summer humidity, faces stoic and resolved.

Most are training just for fitness, outfitted in baggy shorts and tanks and footwear that ranges from sandals to cheap sneakers to worn running shoes. Many are training as budding soccer players, heading to informal early morning practices with friends. One boy jogs down the boulevard toward a local field and holds up a pair of cleats, one in each hand, as if to say, "Well, why else would I put myself through this?"

Along the way, some of the runners pass banners strung high above the street — beautiful, clean, white banners the size of American billboards announcing the upcoming Liberia Marathon. The race will be held eight years after the official end of the war, and its symbol as a unifying event is not lost on race organizers; the race website advertises the marathon online and on T-shirts concisely: "Let's finish together." So amid the joggers and footballers are a dedicated few who will take on a task never before attempted in the country — running a marathon on home soil.

Among the haphazard assortment of runners on this morning in July, Emmanuel Agu is the outlier. While most of his countrymen flail and lumber along, Agu's movement is smooth and efficient, arms swinging lightly, head remaining still as he lopes down the road. Soon, the sound of the nearby ocean waves will be drowned out by car engines and honking horns and screeching tires, but for now the waves rhythmically accompany Agu's long, easy stride.

He wears a pair of rugby shorts and has sweated through the windbreaker he is wearing over his T-shirt, but his amateur outfit does nothing to disguise his natural aptitude for the sport. He is only 19, but his musculature and coordination are reminiscent of a far more developed athlete.

"I am training for a marathon," he says proudly as he pauses to rest. "The full marathon."

In a country country fixated, obsessed, with soccer, this marathon will be Liberia’s first real foray into the world of professional distance running. On the day Agu passes beneath the banners, his head thrown back near the end of his run in fatigue and determination, the race is almost exactly one month away.

All photos courtesy of Peter Harrington/Liberia Marathon

Like many African countries, Liberia has a troubled and complicated past. The country was started as a colony in 1820 by freed American slaves and eventually became established in 1847 as the Liberian Republic with a government modeled after that of the U.S. (The country’s capital was named Monrovia after James Monroe, the fifth president of the U.S. and an early supporter of the colonization.) From the start, the colonists clashed culturally with African-born residents, who were initially barred from citizenship. Liberia was one of the founding members of the United Nations and began to modernize after World War II with significant investment from the U.S. But the tensions continued to mount and in 1980 indigenous Liberian Samuel K. Doe seized power in a military coup.

In 1989, American-educated Liberian Charles Taylor, who had worked for Doe before leaving to lead a group of rebels in an uprising, invaded Liberia from Sierra Leone and began one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars, which lasted until 1996. More than 200,000 Liberians were killed. Six years of Taylor’s rule did not improve the country’s devastated economy and living conditions, and in 2003 the humanitarian crisis again escalated to violence. Taylor was exiled to Nigeria, in part because of his support of a similarly bloody uprising in Sierra Leone, and in 2005 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became first female head of state in Africa when she won the most free elections in Liberia’s history.

Since then, Liberia has been stable politically but living standards still lag behind most of the world. A country of 3.7 million people, it is one of the poorest in the world and relies heavily on foreign aid. Though Sirleaf has been praised for her work in beginning to rebuild the country, roughly two-thirds of Liberians live below the poverty line.

At Sunday long runs that the full scale of the Liberia Marathon’s quixotic quest becomes visible: The race organizers host a weekly training session for those who have registered for the marathon or its sister race, a 10K to be held on the same day, and a large number of potential athletes gather at Samuel Kanyon Doe Stadium just outside town to prepare. The stadium is quietly majestic, its 30,000-person capacity small enough to feel intimate but large enough to be impressive, its closed-bowl design obscuring the otherwise ever-present skyline of smog and traffic crawling along the highway. It houses the country's only all-weather running track, and it is host to the home games of the beloved Lone Star, the national soccer team. On game days, the stands are routinely near capacity; the fervor or the fans can be frightening, even dangerous. On Sundays, the rows and rows of empty, blue concrete bleachers create an eerie calm. But as 7 a.m. approaches and the sun rises above the stadium's reach, the calm is interrupted by laughing and group conversations that grow minute by minute as more people arrive; by the time the run is set to begin on the last Sunday in July, more than 100 runners are gathered.

The official race training program is run by a full eight coaches, but several are absent on this day, and too few are present to deal with the logistics of taking such a large group through Monrovia's notoriously crowded and dangerous streets, where several cars would be needed as aid vehicles. As a result, the runners complete the day's task — the goal is the completion of 13 miles, half the marathon distance — around the 400m oval inside the stadium. After a warm-up jog and some group stretching, the marathon group heads off for the long run while those training for the 10K meet at the top of the backstretch for some interval work. The bravest set off for an even 50 laps (never minding that the distance equates to 20K, a little shy of the actual 13.1-mile objective). Around and around the field they circle, in both directions. As the morning ages, more than a few drop out. Only a handful actually make the entire distance, while the rest merely stop once the fastest have finished their laps. In 27 days, these runners will face not merely loops around a field, but a single, iconic circumnavigation of their country's capital city.

"I am not fit for the 26," says 56-year-old Elijah Jolo, eyeing the scene of attrition around him. Wisely perhaps, he will opt to run the 10K.

Speaking privately before the race, organizers are worried that not all participants will have such foresight, especially if motivated by a $16,000 prize purse; $3,000 is slated for the men's and women's marathon winners, but with some invited foreign athletes scheduled to race, the first-place money almost certainly will go to them. In order to keep local interest high, and because organizers feared that foreign athletes claiming all the prize money would be demoralizing to local runners, the marathon organizing committee decided to put aside a $1,000 “patriot prize” for the first Liberian man and woman across the line. The result is an intense fascination with the prospect of earning such a relatively rich payday in a country where the average GDP per capita, according to The New York Times, is only $900. Many runners who have never before trained are still intent on chasing this purse. Still others are hell-bent on finishing the race simply for the challenge. In either case, the consequences for those so utterly unfamiliar with distance running could be catastrophic.
The banners posted around the city are the most visible advertisement for the race for most Liberians, and across the front, a stylized image of a runner crossing a finish line, hands outstretched in victory, is the dominant focus. That runner, to anyone even mildly familiar with world-class distance running, is the unmistakable form of Paul Tergat, a former world record-holder at 10K and the marathon, five-time world cross country champion, two-time Olympic medalist. Tergat is from Kenya, famously the most dominant marathoning nation in the world. That Tergat graces the banner for the first-ever marathon in Liberia is a bit like the Oakland A's advertising an upcoming series with the Yankees by posting pictures of Babe Ruth on the stadium walls: It is the clear acknowledgment of a superior tradition.

Yet the Liberian Ministry for Youth and Sport, which operates as a department of the federal government, has latched onto the marathon in an attempt to change this.

"If you look at the entire western region of Africa, it's noted for developing sprinters," says Frederick Krah, technical official for the Liberian Athletic Federation. "But we are looking forward to developing long-distance runners." The ministry hopes to identify Liberian athletes who perform well in the marathon and work to develop them into international-caliber runners.

At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, marathoners from Zimbabwe and even Rwanda represented Africa, but not a single distance runner from West Africa qualified. Liberia sent only three athletes to the 2008 Games; all were track athletes, but two were sprinters and one was a decathlete.

The federation began its national team training camp to coincide with the buildup to the marathon. On the camp's first day, a motley assortment of athletes turned up to the stadium, with some among them indeed middle-distance and distance specialists. Head coach Frederick Massaquoi put the runners and jumpers through a general strength and fitness circuit.

The warm-up exercises trended toward the old-school: toe touches, jumping jacks, static stretching. The workout itself saw Agu performing a calisthenic circuit and short sprint drills, appropriate for an athlete just beginning his season but not as typical for one a few weeks away from racing a marathon. The development of distance running will take time and hard-earned experience, both on the part of runners and coaches. But the process is nevertheless underway.

Deputy minister for sports Marbue Richards, who oversees all sporting activities in Liberia, sees the symbolic importance of the marathon but agrees with Krah about a larger vision.

"It's an attempt, also," he says of the race, "to identify some athletes who can be trained for marathons outside Liberia."

The Liberia Marathon, then, is perhaps a vehicle for delivering something larger than a single race: Some hope it may represent the beginning of distance running as an authentic, competitive sport in the country.

Agu hopes to be a part of this development, of course.

"In this country, this is the very first marathon," he says. "It's important to take part in order to make history. I have the ambition to do better, and I know I can cover the distance."

For this runner, who spent many of his own developing years in Ghana, hiding from violence in his home country, the opportunity is one he has never before seen. Yet a few days later, Agu contracts malaria. And so, at the most critical time of training for the race, he is relegated to his bed.
The originator of all the excitement is Peter Harrington, a native of England who came to Liberia in April 2010 to work for a British organization assisting the Liberian government’s transition to democracy. He moved to Monrovia having just run the London Marathon, and with that race fresh on his mind, he began wondering about the possibility of hosting a race in West Africa.

"I didn't know the first thing about organizing races," he says. "I didn't know where to start."

The idea, however, stuck with him. He did some research. By the time he bought himself a plane ticket to watch and research the Accra International Marathon in Ghana firsthand, he could no longer kid himself that organizing a marathon in Liberia was a passing thought.

He put together a core team of 10 volunteers, created a board of directors, got the course measured according to international road racing standards. He enlisted the help of the government, people like Richards who would play a critical role in making the race logistically possible. In one moment Harrington calls "absolutely inspired," one of the volunteers came up with the idea of getting the Liberian military on board. With the motivation of mending fences with a population distrustful of soldiers in uniform after the war, the military eagerly signed on, and suddenly the race had trucks, and manpower, and equipment to make race necessities like water stations possible. Behind it all, Harrington says he was driven by the idea of what the race could mean both domestically and internationally.

"For most people, the connotations for Liberia are child soldiers, blood diamonds, Naomi Campbell taking the stand in Charles Taylor's trial talking about 'dirty little stones,'" Harrington says, referencing Liberia's former dictator’s alleged involvement in war crimes, including participation in the infamous conflict diamond industry in neighboring Sierra Leone. "They think about poverty, conflict, suffering. So even at the most basic level, telling the world you can run 26 miles around Monrovia safely — that's a really powerful message."

Domestically, Harrington believes the race can be even more significant.

"If you're living under 14 years of war, you take what's in front of you when you can get it," he says. "If there's food, grab it, eat it. If there's something in front of you, take it, because you don't know if you're going to survive the next day. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that there is a deeply engraved 'take what you can when it's in front of you' psyche, and I think that's inimical, on some profound level, to the mindset Liberia needs to have, which is slow, patient endurance to achieve that 80-year process of reconstruction as a country. It's not a sprint. The whole country is running a marathon."

Deputy minister Richards has an equally broad focus.

"The marathon, by its nature here being an international event, will bring focus to athletics," he says. "Besides just the athletic portion of it, it's going to provide an opportunity for outsiders to see Liberia, to see the development that has gone on since the civil crisis. It will serve as a means, also, of providing some economic opportunities to the county. Tourism, for example: As people come in, hotels, restaurants, etc., will have an opportunity to increase business. So the marathon for us is a welcome opportunity to showcase Liberia, especially as we go into this period of elections. It will showcase the peaceful nature of the process that is going on, and give Liberia the opportunity to be seen on an international scene."

The process of organizing the race became more complex than Harrington had imagined. From traffic control to organizing race entries to nabbing sponsors to paying for publicity, Harrington had to learn on the fly, often, he says, sending emails at 2 a.m. when he would jolt awake, remembering a critical oversight. Quickly, he became obsessed, by his own admission, with a thought that kept him moving forward.

"What an amazing thing this can be," he says, "to propel Liberia along that journey it's already on."

The marathon got a boost when BHP Billiton signed on as a sponsor. The world’s largest mining, oil and gas company has been under contract with the Liberian government since the Johnson Sirleaf administration took office in 2006 to mine iron ore deposits and explore off-shore oil reserves.
On race day, a light rain coated the Liberian capital, providing ideal temperatures for the runners. The start of the marathon was smooth; the start of the 10K was positively thrilling, as President Johnson Sirleaf made a surprise appearance and, accompanied by U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ran part of the course.

Agu woke that day feeling better than he had expected. Though his bout with malaria had left him less prepared than he might have been, he felt compelled to race anyway, and for the first part of the marathon it seemed things were going his way. He jumped out to an early lead, trailing only eventual winner Mehari Gebre Baraki of Ethiopia, but by halfway his lack of fitness caught up with him. He began to fade. Finally, when a slight strain in his lower leg became too much to endure, he dropped out of the race.

But Agu was almost alone in his misfortune. In total, 152 runners completed the entire 26.2 miles, a stunning number for the first marathon ever held in the country. Baraki won in a relatively slow 2:29:26, well ahead of runner-up Osman Konte of neighboring Sierra Leone, to pocket the $3,000 first prize. Johnson Edmund was the top Liberian runner, taking fifth overall in 3:20:02 and earning the $1,000 homeland prize. On the women’s side, 16-year-old Liberian Lucy Massaquoi claimed the top spot in 4:18:26 (and her $1,000 bonus), just 16 seconds ahead of countrywoman Gifty Honse.

Perhaps even more impressive, 837 runners finished the 10K. For all the race organizers’ fear that Liberians may not have been ready for a race of this magnitude, Aug. 28 came and went without a single medical emergency, and with almost universal praise for the event from participants.

They say that during the Ivory Coast's famous play against some of the best soccer teams in the world in the 2006 World Cup, the country, amid festering tensions of a civil war, ceased its violence to watch its soccer team play, putting aside divisions for a game.

Though civil war in the Ivory Coast merely paused, the image of a temporary peace moved viewers around the world, and the Ivory Coast soccer team became an unmistakable symbol for the power of sports.

Liberia shares a similar story.

"Sports has been used as a unifier," Richards says. "We recall that during the heat of the war, when our national football team had to play games, the factions laid down their arms, people came and supported the national team, and then they went back to their positions. So sport is a vehicle for peace, and we continue to use it in that direction."

In November 2011, Liberia hosted the final round of the second democratic elections since the end of its civil war. President Johnson Sirleaf, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a month earlier, won in an election that was widely considered free and fair. On April 26, 2012, former president Charles G. Taylor, was convicted by an international tribunal on Thursday of arming, supporting and guiding a brutal rebel movement that committed mass atrocities in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s.

The story of the Liberia Marathon is not one of overcoming a civil war. That process began years ago and it will end years after the final runner has crossed the race's finish line inside the stadium. Nor is the story of the marathon found in Liberia's ability to host such an ambitious event; the country must aim far higher in the coming years as it develops politically and socially. But there is a combination of these themes — a nation able to work across former divisions to host an event of this scale — that is symbolic and important.

Plans for the second Liberia Marathon in early 2013 are already underway.

Perhaps just as important, though, is the story of Emmanuel Agu, a talented runner who suffered through the race’s first edition but used the strength he gained in training for the event to propel him to a national championship on the track in the 1500m four months later.

"It's just about love," Agu says. "When you're doing something and you're into it, you just feel good about it. Whenever I run, I feel happy."